As a band of American expats (and one Italian) living in Shanghai, the pre-emptively named prog-punk band Round Eye get opportunities that most bands would envy, even while living under the boot of a censorious authoritarian government. About a year ago, we told you about their video for “Billy,” an attack on the increasing brutality of American police—a nervy move, as China’s censors could have easily taken the song’s anti-cop sentiments as a sideways swipe at their own police state. Living under a regime that sees a nail sticking up and immediately moves to hammer it down is surely tricky to navigate as an outsider, and Round Eye have had run-ins with Chinese authorities before.

More recently, they landed an incredible opportunity that’s been extraordinarily rare for a band of Westerners—they were able, in October, to film a music video in the even more insanely repressive state of North Korea. Precedents for this are few—Washington D.C. rappers Pacman and Peso pulled it off in 2014, and last year, a pair of YouTube personalities went to North Korea to make a pretty fucking execrable everything-is-awesome pop video that seems almost certain to have been a propaganda device for Pyongyang. Round Eye, though they had no tour dates in the country (that might have been a bigger score than shooting the video there) were permitted to record footage under extreme restrictions. Naturally, they managed to sneak out some unapproved images, though.

Recently, some unauthorized photography has been making its way out of North Korea, and much of it is striking for how mundane it is. If it were all images of starving kids (of which there are sickening numbers) it would be understandable that a despotic regime would try to clamp that shit down, but much of it prompts wonder at why it would merit repression. The Round Eye video for “Sifter”—from the forthcoming Monstervision, an LP which includes “Billy,” and which features the final recorded performances of the late Stooges sax man Steve Mackay—features guys in an underground rock band being goofballs at an amusement park that could have been anywhere, cut with stolen shots of countryside and people that again, feels like it could be in any Asian country if you don’t look all that closely. It’s rendered compelling by the fact that it was shot furtively in a really heavy repression/censorship state. While “Billy” was an over the top attack on authoritarian violence, this feels like a mere travelogue.

Round Eye’s singer, the mononymic Chachy, took some time to talk with us about getting approval to bring the band to NK and their experiences in that nation.

Dangerous Minds: Obviously North Korea is a real diplomatic sore spot when it comes to Americans, how did you even get to go? Was it easier because you were coming from China?

Chachy: Well logistically it was. Politically we had to go through a screening process with a North Korean touring agency called UriTours. We had to get specific visas that could NOT go in our passports, and while we’re there mum’s the word.

DM: “Mum’s the word” meaning you had to keep it concealed that you’d been there?

Chachy: On our passports, yes. No stamps, no glued visa.

DM: Was that for NK’s sake or for yours?

Chachy: I really have no idea. Things were very vague when it came to documentation. They even held onto our passports for the duration of the trip, which was a week.

One distinct post-9/11 memory I have was purchasing Is This It, the debut album by The Strokes, and noticing that it was missing a track. It turns out the song “New York City Cops” had been removed—the NYPD had essentially been canonized and absolutely no one wanted to be seen as critical of first responders. It turns out the same thing happened to the great George Carlin, who recorded some some anti-police material just a few weeks prior to 9/11, only to have it shelved in the wake of terrorist attacks and subsequent ennobling of the NYPD. Now via SiriusXM’s “Carlin’s Corner” you can hear the offending bit below.

George Carlin, let’s not forget, had very good—and personal—reasons to resent the police, having been famously arrested himself for obscenity in Milwaukee in 1972 for performing his “Seven Words You Can Never Say on Television” routine—an off-duty police officer who was in the audience dropped a dime on him for using profanity onstage. As the well-known story goes, Carlin’s wife Brenda got onstage during her husband’s set to let him know that the police were congregating and waiting to arrest him. Carlin’s performance ran 30 minutes longer and he brought the house down, all the while making to ditch the cocaine in his pocket right before the cops nabbed him. Carlin only spent a few hours in jail and was freed on $150 bail, but it was a narrowly missed disaster over some dirty jokes.

The bit about cops, titled “Rats & Squealers” will be on the upcoming album of previously unreleased material I Kinda Like It When A Lotta People Die available from MPI Media/Eardrum Records on CD, limited edition vinyl and digital platforms on September 16, 2016.

I’ve been waiting for this primo item of Desert Storm-abilia to turn up on YouTube for years, and Lord knows I have waited patiently; for as the Good Book reminds us, “the race is not to the swift” (Ecclesiastes 9:11), and some of these fuckers are anything but swift.

Back in ‘91, Jerry Martin (a/k/a Jerry Buckner) rode the tide of blood unleashed by the first Gulf War all the way to #71 on Billboard’s country chart. I’m still struggling to understand how this epistolary spoken word release qualified as a country song, but I’m going to bet it had something to do with the kinds of radio stations that played it and the obscure regions of our nation to which their signals penetrated. A cassingle issued in a plain gray sleeve, Martin’s “Letter to Saddam Hussein” had little in common with Jello Biafra’s contemporary Gulf War cassingle, “Die for Oil, Sucker,” which pointed out that we might not be fighting for the noblest of causes.

Martin left that kind of thinking to eggheads, Poindexters and Philadelphia lawyers. On his cassingle, he allowed as how he didn’t know much of anything, because being so ordinary, regular and real didn’t leave a lot of time for studies. But there was one thing he did know: our pride would be Saddam’s shame.

I mentioned that Jerry Martin was the pseudonym of Jerry Buckner. Now, I can’t be sure this is theJerry Buckner of “Pac Man Fever” fame, but I do wonder how many vocal talents named Jerry Buckner might plausibly reside in the Atlanta area. To whom was Saddam supposed to address his reply? Whatever, I bet the dictator thought twice about showing his face down south after this tape came out. Cut way down on his trips to Georgia.

Now a quarter-century old—its sleeve no longer the shiny gray I remember from my Sam Goody youth, but the dull gray I see in my Sam Elliott beard—this curiosity fetches outrageous prices on Amazon. I can’t imagine why. I hope it’s because there are a lot of Big Lebowski and Nevermind fans researching the beginnings of American history’s most bogus journey.

Without spoiling the dramatic ending of “Letter to Saddam Hussein,” I can tell you that we kept its promise. Our boys showed Saddam who was boss, thereby transforming the entire Fertile Crescent into a fiery whirlwind of widows’ blood and children’s limbs. Now our boys will be there showing Saddam who’s boss forever!

This doesn’t seem to be a joke. Businessman Paul Salo has started a crowd-funding campaign on Indiegogo.com seeking 1.5 million dollars to purchase a 767 and a building. He intends to fly the plane, loaded with jet fuel, into the building, purportedly to prove “once and for all” what “really” happened on 9-11.

The project, titled 911 REDUX, is planned to take place in Thailand where Salo claims to have talked to the Thai military about purchasing a “used airplane” and a “used building.”

Salo’s campaign statement:

Many people want to know more about 9-11. We are like a Mythbusters for September 11th. It’s an important project for many reasons. Many people doubt various details of 9-11. As the world has changed our trust in government and media has declined significantly. We want to see for ourselves. We don’t need people to guide our thinking. In this project we will recreate 9-11 to the best of our ability given the funds raised. Our ultimate goal is a fully loaded 767 and a similar structure to the WTC. We will crash the fully loaded (with fuel) plane (complete with black box) into the building using autopilot at 500 MPH.

You will be able to see for yourself what happens under these extreme circumstances. I’m not sure which country we will purchase the aircraft and building but it doesn’t really matter much. I’m a globe trotter and will go where we need to go to complete this important project.

You can be a part of this. How will it end up? Will the plane disintegrate? Will the black box disappear? Will the out of date passports we scatter in the plane survive? You will see it all. We aren’t trying to prove anything either way. We will recreate the event and let the chips fall where they may.

At the time of this writing the campaign has raised $105 out of the $1.5M goal.

How do we give form to the formless? How do we name that which is unnameable? How do we describe the indescribable? These are challenges that religion, the occult and magic have addressed since humanity first appeared on this planet. In an effort to communicate the divine, the transcendent, the psychedelic, we use devices like art and ritual. We cloak the mystical in words and images in the same way that GOD cloaks itself in the visible world to tell its story. Is life a great metaphor representing something that we cannot see, but know is there? Anyone who has had a “spiritual” experience has had a glimpse into, or a sense of, something greater that we are all a part of. Some go toward this experience alone—St. John or Jesus. Some go as a group, feeling that the odds are better that someone among them will serve as antennae, to dial into the radio of the gods and share the signal. These groups require focus and ceremony (a process) in order to cement the bonds of community, to attain a group consciousness that elevates one and all. We see this kind of collective mindset in everything from sports to business teams to religious organizations. But communities we don’t understand, that we deem weird or esoteric, we pejoratively call “cults.” The fervent devotion of sports fans, the mind-obliterating, soul-destroying Wal-Mart cheer forced upon its employees, the idolization of Steve Jobs and sheep-like behavior of Deadheads, Ben Carson and his groupies for God, all have cult-like aspects to them. But we dare not call them cults. We reserve the word to marginalize and demonize spiritual movements we do not understand or forms of art considered degenerate. “Cult” is a dirty word.

Confessions Of A Teenage Hippie Pervert

I’ve often wondered if I’ve ever been a cult member. During the Summer Of Love I lived in the Haight with a dozen or more teenagers my age who dropped acid, fucked each other and danced to psychedelic music in the glow of black lights and incense haze. We chanted “OM” and passed joints and waited for some kind of magic to happen. And it was happening. It just wasn’t the dramatic type of magic we were hoping for. I do think we collectively levitated once. I lived in a Los Gatos home owned by an ordained priest of The Church Of Tomorrow. He had the best LSD and his stream of consciousness talks seemed to be filled with all kinds of mindblowing heaviness. He had a gravitational pull that seemed superhuman. Young beautiful women flocked to him and I flocked to them. Was this a cult or was it just a groovy hangout? I lived in L.A. in 1967 and worked for a telemarketing agency (definitely a cult) and my young longhaired co-workers were the kinds of Southern California hippies that seemed more like extras from Beyond The Valley Of The Dolls than actual hippies. I spent a night tripping with them in a suburban ranch house and all they talked about was having rough sex with each other involving beatings, leather and whips. I love all kinds of sex, but this talk was brutal, chilling. The words coming out of their mouths were ugly, flailing through the room like syntactical succubi. What the fuck was I hearing? I fled the scene and ended up having a seriously intense trip in a telephone booth trying to call the only other people I knew in L.A. to come rescue me.

To this day I’m not sure that what I experienced with those “kinky perverts” actually happened. I may have been projecting my id into the situation, my repressed fantasies. After all I was raised in one of the biggest cults of them all, Catholicism. Were they a sex cult? Was what I was hearing all in my own head. Cults are crazy that way. They’re open to interpretation and are often victims of what people think they’re perceiving as opposed to what’s actually happening. Cults are often the repository for the desires we fear. And some cults are created to fuck with those fears, fantasies and projections.

Processeans

Altamont: Hitler’s Woodstock

The French surrealists and dadaists employed occult imagery to shake up the status quo.They were called a “movement.” They could have just as easily been called a cult. New York’s Living Theatre used confrontational ceremony and transgressive ritual to tear apart the restraints that bound their audiences to dead and archaic modes of thinking. As a theater group, they worked intensely and constantly with each other and often lived communally. Were they a cult? Was Altamont the biggest black mass ever held and were those of us who attended unwitting members of some kind of Satanic sacrifice? (I was there. It sure looked like Hell to me.) Is Facebook the ultimate cult, dwarfing any cult or religion known to man or woman, unstoppable in its indoctrination of every living breathing human being on this earth? I see more devotion directed toward Facebook than any religion I’ve ever encountered. More people are facing their monitor screens than Mecca or reading from their Bibles.

The Living Theatre

Facebook: The Bible Of The Damned

Dr. Timothy Leary was vilified for turning on a generation of young people to the vast beauty and possibilities of their own minds. Mark Zuckerberg is celebrated for reducing our consciousness to the dimensions of a 14-inch screen filled with pictures of food, cats, obituary notices and forlorn pictures of aging rock and rollers. Jesus (who had a cult of just 12) was crucified for being a weirdo. Joel Osteen has made a fortune playing Jesus in a Brooks Brothers suit. Given the choice between Aleister Crowley or Ted Cruz for President, The Beast gets my vote. I always go with the Devil I know. They turned David Koresh and a bunch of innocent children torched to a pile of ash and yet war criminal Dick Cheney still walks among us, his mechanical heart still beating, his rictus smirk still mocking us all. Donald Rumsfeld lived in Taos, New Mexico within spitting distance of where Marshall Applewhite leader of the Heaven’s Gate suicide cult ran a health food restaurant. Did Rummy eat Beezlebub’s bean sprouts? Did he dream of weapons of mass destruction hurtling toward us like a comet. In a world where companies make billions selling video games (talk about cults) in which teenage boys roleplay as carjackers, murderers and thugs, a kid named Ahmed Mohamed was arrested for bringing a homemade clock to school. The mass hypnosis taking place in this world right now makes Charles Manson look about as intimidating as Chuck Woolery. Most Americans have been, and will continue to vote for a government that is actively working against their best interests. Under what spell have we fallen? We follow blindly, faithfully, surrendering our will to higher powers, both political and religious. Welcome to the biggest cult of them all: the United States Of America. Rant over.

Crazy Wisdom Drove Me Crazy

Back in simpler days when a cult was a cult and easily identifiable—they wore robes or funny hats—a group of young men and women gathered together in 60s London to form The Process, a quasi-religious group that were part spiritual seekers, part performance art and more than a little bit rock and roll. They had long hair, were beautiful and dressed like priests styled by a Carnaby Street tailor. Their methods were a mashup of Scientology, occultism, psychedelia, pop culture and dada. The members of The Process Church Of The Final Judgement were genuinely on a path to find out the answers to life’s most profound questions: how did we get here, what are supposed to do here and where the fuck are we going? But unlike most religious folk, the members of The Process realized that the journey was the goal and didn’t have to be deadly serious. The Process was all about the process. Enjoy it. In many respects it resembled Chogyam Trungpa’s teachings on crazy wisdom. I was a student of Trungpa’s. From an idiot’s point of view, Trungpa was a cult leader.

Chogyam Trungpa

Attack Of The Hooded Snuffoids

In their zeal to shake things up, The Process occasionally went off the deep end and this is where they ran into problems. People, particularly the British press, could not separate the theatrical from the real. And the The Process was very theatrical. Like Antonin Artaud or Andy Kaufman, The Process was adept at elaborate mindfucking. They were the mystical turd in the very bland punch bowl of British society. In mocking religious hypocrisy, they were often mistaken for being the very thing they were mocking. Their shock tactics often backfired. Surrounding themselves with the iconography of Satanism was a heavy metal move years before Black Sabbath had ever released a record. But try explaining that to the tabloids who called them Satan worshippers and sex deviants. Or worse, Ed Sanders’ hate-filled description of The Process as “hooded snuffoids” and “an English occult society dedicated to observing and aiding the end of the world by stirring up murder, violence and chaos, and dedicated to the proposition that they shall survive the gore as the chosen people.” I’m as big a Fugs fan as anyone out there, but Sanders really missed the irony of him, of all people, writing this shit. Sanders’ band The Fugs were themselves quite skilled in the art of the mindfuck. Using majikal incantations to Egyptian gods, The Fugs attempted to levitate the Pentagon in protest of the Vietnam war. When you’ve successfully conned a con artist like Ed Sanders, you’ve managed something to be quite proud of.

Power to The Process. And Ed, to quote the title of your once infamous literary ‘zine, fuck you.

Ed Sanders’ exorcism chant

Skinny Puppy Housebroken By Satan

While I’m not an expert on any of this cult stuff, like most people, I find it immensely fascinating. The Manson Family creeps me out in ways that deeply disturb me, although groups like The Source, The Process and even Scientology provide me the kind of amusement that diffuses some of the darker shit. If you want to delve further into The Process from the point of view of someone who knows far more than me and does it objectively and with just enough wit and empathy, check out filmmaker Neil Edwards’ insightful and thoroughly entertaining new documentary Sympathy For The Devil. Full of interviews with surviving members of The Process and various experts in the field of all things “cult,” Edwards’ film will introduce you to the real truth behind the head games, rumors, bullshit and theater. And as Edwards told me, like its subject, the movie is a work in progress. There is more to be told and probably more that will never be told.

The AK-47, or Kalashnikov, is one of the most popular assault rifles in the world due to its low cost, ease of availability, reliability under harsh conditions, and accuracy when being used to carve crude faces into seasonal gourds.

Meet YouTube user Hickok45, a gun enthusiast with over 1.6 million subscribers, who will demonstrate turning a pumpkin into a proper jack-o-lantern using only an AK-47:

He has uploaded several videos displaying his incredible skills as the world’s foremost jack-o-lantern marksman.

His latest video, uploaded a few days ago, has him using a Henry Rifle to create a crude visage on a hapless pumpkin.

Hickok45 describes his videos as an “attempt to educate the masses about how to properly and safely carve a pumpkin,” adding, “word has it that people are still using dangerous, sharp knives to do this.”

A Florida gun manufacturer called Spike’s Tactical is manufacturing “The Crusader,” an assault rifle engraved with a Templar shield, boasting the safety settings “Peace,” “War, and “God Wills It,” and emblazoned with the following Biblical verse, from Psalm 144:

A spokesman for Spike’s Tactical explained to Tampa Bay/Sarasota’s 10NEWS that the Christian iconography on the weapon is intended to make it repellent to Muslims:

Right now and as it has been for quite some time, one of the biggest threats in the world is and remains Islamic terrorism. We wanted to make sure we built a weapon that would never be able to be used by Muslim terrorists to kill innocent people or advance their radical agenda.

It sounds like they’re shooting for something resembling nobility or righteousness—albeit in a bigoted-dick kind of way—but ultimately that explanation rings hollow. If their motivation was truly to prevent Jihadists from using their wares against the good folk of By-God-AMERICA, why don’t ALL their guns have, say, John 3:16 on them, like an un-stealthy version of the Trijicon rifle sights provided to the U.S. Military a few years back? I was amused to find an assault rifle on their site called the “Pure Estrogen,” which sports the molecular diagram for that very important hormone etched right where the Crusader has the verse from Psalms. So it seems far likelier that the Crusader is just a fetish object, pandering to the tastes of right wing Christian machine-of-hot-lead-death enthusiasts. Besides, while it’s true that in many parts of the world Islamists ARE one of the gravest threats going—the Middle East and parts of North Africa leap readily to mind—Florida simply isn’t one of them. In fact, in the USA you’re vastly more likely to be the victim of a gun-obsessed white right-winger. I’m 100% sure I’ll get flamed for that, but research supporting the assertion is morethanabundant, and the FBI has been warning of that eventuality as far back as February of 2002, just months after the 9/11 attacks.

But knowing that will stop no asshole from praising the Lord and passing the ammunition.

On December 23rd, 1975, Gerald Ford signed the reasonable Metric Conversion Act into law, stating, “the truth is that our continued use of the English system of measurement was making us an island in a metric sea.”

School curriculums were altered to teach the metric system, despite the fact that converting was overwhelmingly unpopular with Americans, who were used to doing things the ‘murican way—not no pansy, pussy-ass European way.

In 1982, progressive agent of change, President Ronald Wilson Reagan officially disbanded the U.S. Metric Board—the government organization charged with “increasing the use” of the metric system in the United States. Reagan did so citing efforts to “reduce government spending,” but really it was because America, fuck yeah.

In 1976 King-Seeley Thermos Company released what has to have been the worst-selling lunchbox of all time:

The Exciting World of Metrics lunchbox!

It’s safe to assume that whatever kid was unfortunate enough to have been sent off to school with this box in tow, was beaten mercilessly within centimeters of his life.

Luckily, ‘70s lunchboxes were made out of HARD metal with a swingable handle, so at least the kid had a fighting chance!

Former underage porn actress, Traci Lords, stars in the new Jim Wynorski blockbuster, Sharkansas Women’s Prison Massacre. Wynorski is responsible for the best ‘80s murderous shopping-mall robot movie, Chopping Mall, 1988’s Not of This Earth (also starring Lords),Pirañaconda, and more than 40 other “quality” titles. Judging solely by the trailer, Sharkansas Women’s Prison Massacre promises to deliver the same standard of excellence we’ve come to expect from the prolific director. The film also stars Dominique Swain (Fall Down Dead, Nazis at the Center of the Earth).

This is the synopsis we have:

When a fracking mishap accidentally rips apart the earth’s crust, the resulting hole opens up a gaping underground waterway to a vast and mysterious ocean somewhere deep below. Instantly, giant prehistoric sharks begin wending their way upward toward a murky bog in the heart of the Arkansas Bayou. Unfortunately for a group of female prisoners on a work detail in the swamp, the deadly sharks attack without warning – pinning a hapless group of intended victims in a small deserted cabin in the heart of the wetlands. Death may be the only means of escape!

These sharks don’t just swim through the bayous—they also burrow through the ground Bugs Bunny style! Landsharks with a craving for female convict blood! The back-end for CGI sharks must be really cheap these days, as the Sharksploitation genre is in its golden age with titles such as Sharknado, Sharktopus, Ghost Shark, Snow Shark, Psycho Shark, Sand Sharks, and Raiders Of The Lost Shark. Sure, we’ve seen sharks in the swamp before in 2011’s Swamp Shark, but Wynorski had the vision to add female prisoners and Traci Lords!

Just put the words “Traci Lords,” “women in prison,” “fracking mishap,” and “landsharks” together and I’m instantly asking “where do I send my money?” I asked Jim Wynorski himself and he is remaining tight-lipped for the time being, stating only that the film will be “ready for release in mid-May.” It seems the film is still looking for a home. Wynorski wouldn’t comment on a DVD release, but indicated that SyFy would be taking a look at the picture upon completion.

Here’s the trailer for what promises to be the most important film of 2015:

If you can get this past security at your local strip club—and let’s be honest, if your local strip club has security, it’s probably not that interesting to begin with—you can be the reigning (raining?) King of Fools parted from his money.

This miracle device allows its brandisher to blow through large amounts of cash at an alarmingly high rate of speed. You’re not just “making it rain,” you just brought the typhoon up in this piece.

The Cash Cannon™ Money Gun is a toy that dispenses paper items in a rapid but user controlled manner. The preferred item of choice to dispense is of course cash but any item that fits in the loading compartment and out of the slot will work with the device. The Cash Cannon™ is the first device that performs this function and is simple enough in terms of design to be mass manufactured for the public use.

If the psychology behind throwing out large amounts of money in a gentleman’s club is creating an atmosphere of fun from an affected lack of concern, then the Cash Canon instantly turns what might have been three minutes of self-important limelight into four and a half seconds of pathetic confusion. The top dog always spreads the money around and you can’t get top doggier than literally spewing it all over the place like a first year fraternity brother retching up last night’s kamikazes. All you have to do is load the Cash Cannon with your favorite denomination of currency, gently squeeze the trigger, and look forward to tomorrow’s regret.